India is currently in a phase where a lot of indie game developers have cropped up with their games and the market is dominated by the free-to-play games. On the other hand, Yellow Monkey Studios’ Socioball comes with a premium price tag attached to it and the developers want to break the notion that a freemium game is the only way to go about.
Socioball is a puzzle game where you guide the ball to its goal by placing various tiles which direct the ball to the goal. You have no direct control over the ball. There are various types of tiles at your disposal, such as corners, buttons, jumps, teleporters and so on. So say you put a corner tile on the board and hit the play button you’ll see the ball rolling and when it reaches the corner tile it will turn in that direction. The game currently has 60 levels ready to play, with each passing level getting a little difficult as you move forward. You may feel 60 levels is not enough of game play but that is where the ‘social’ element comes to the fore as the name ‘SocioBall’ suggests.
The social part of the name is where you connect the game to your Twitter account and share new levels which you can create through the game’s own level editor. Your friends can tweet you some levels or you can tweet levels to the game’s community where all the players of the game get access to the levels. The developers have promised to update levels on a weekly basis and help the game grow as well.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Yellow Monkey Studios founder Shailesh Prabhu says, “I saw Socioball at NASSCOM Game Developers Conference (NGDC) 2013, where Apoorva Joshi (programmer and game design for SocioBall) had displayed the game and I was quite impressed with the concept of the game which was initially developed for PC on XNA and suggested to tinker with a mobile version of the same. So Apoorva started working on the mobile version on Unity from scratch and asked me if I could do the game’s level design and UI and that is how I came into the picture and the game finally released on 15 January.”
Continuing from Heubrix, Yellow Monkey Studios’ last game, Socioball too has a minimalistic look with assets created beautifully by Apoorva. With a clutterless UI, you are focused on solving the puzzles than distracted by some eye-popping UI that has in-your-face colours; the focus is majorly on the board in this game.
Shailesh explains,” When I saw Socioball’s prototype on PC, even back then some of the elements were fairly minimal in the gameplay but the UI was extensive. So, when we started to make the game from scratch, our effort was to make it completely minimal and I think people like what we’ve created.”
Speaking about premium games and getting featured on the Apple App Store, Shailesh reflects that developers need to polish their games and give priority to quality over quantity. “Indian game developers need to raise the bar for quality. There is a need to create something that you would pay for and play on an Apple device. One should think on the lines of what kind of games will a user prefer to play an Apple device; also having a great production value that he/she can cherish. Deliver that kind of experience and you have a chance of featuring your game on the Apple App Store.”
Yellow Monkey Studios is currently working on a few prototypes and one can expect some more exciting games from the studio in the first half of 2015.
